Tag: Expanded Tweets

Looks like there is some close work Microsoft is doing with Twitter. In addition to announcing a Windows Phone 8-specific Twitter application coming with Windows Phone 8, looks like the behind-the-scenes work is complete for showing SkyDrive pictures inline on Twitter.

If you use a Windows Phone and share pictures natively (select a picture > share > Twitter), it uploads the picture to SkyDrive and then publishes the SkyDrive link to Twitter along with the tweet message. Below is an example:

Tweet with SkyDrive picture link

Until now, that “View Photo” link was not visible and as a result, expanding the tweet would not show the photo. In order to see the photo you’d have to click on the link which would take you to SkyDrive’s website and open it there. Compared to inline, that was a bad experience.

Now, you can see the picture inline by just clicking on “View Photo” as I did here:

SkyDrive picture inline on Twitter

It doesn’t look like SkyDrive pictures are integrated into Twitter’s “Recent Images” section on the profile page yet. Hopefully the Image Gallery update will roll out soon as well.

Regardless, it is a good thing that Twitter (with or without Microsoft) has worked out the technical stuff to make SkyDrive pictures show up inline. After all, we know that SkyDrive now has 200 million users and stores 11 billion photos so it is not a small operation. With Windows 8 and Windows RT (along with, of course, Windows Phone 8) relying heavily on SkyDrive as the personal cloud of choice, the usage will only go up.

A final note, given that Twitter’s iOS and Android apps behave much like the website, I suppose these pictures from SkyDrive will also show inline in those apps, although I have not been able to confirm that.